History Revisited
by lateBloomer04
Summary: After it was brought to their attention, Katniss and Peeta have to explain to their children why Peeta tried to strangle Katniss when he was rescued from the Capitol.


Disclaimer: The Hunger Games belong to Suzanne Collins. Katniss and Peeta belong to Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson. They aren't mine.

A/N: This is my first Hunger Games fic, so be kind. I wanted to write about Katniss and Peeta's children wondering about some of the events of Mockingjay, specifically Peeta strangling Katniss. Their parents give them an explanation. Takes place a few years after the epilogue.

.~.

_History Revisited_

_.~._

I knew that one day my children would ask their father and I about our role in the Hunger Games, the revolution, all of it. We'd been planning on telling them what happened when they were old enough to know, which was soon. But what I hadn't been planning on was for Karin to come home from school and ask,

"Is it true that you tried to strangle Mother after the rebels rescued you from the Capitol?"

Peeta and I agreed not to discuss it until the children were ready for bed. Then Karin and Jesse climbed into our king-size bed and snuggled close. Peeta began and I realized that I've never heard his side of the story, about this anyway. It was a subject that we tended to avoid.

"First, of all, to answer your question, yes, it is true," Peeta said easily. "I did try to strangle your mother. Thankfully, I did not succeed. There was a time when I was ashamed of that fact, but, thanks to a lot of therapy, I was able to realize that my actions weren't my fault."

"Whose fault was it?" Jesse asked.

Peeta glanced at me over our children's heads.

"It was the Capitol's," I said darkly. "They reprogrammed your father's brain using a torture technique called hijacking. They messed with his memories of me, distorted them into evil, false images. They convinced him that I had destroyed District Twelve, his family, and his friends. Sometimes they went for the angle that I wasn't even human – just a mutation hell bent on destruction."

"I thought that the only way to stop such an evil force like Katniss was to kill her." Peeta gave me an apologetic grin. "Hence, the strangling. She was really quite surprised by it all. Neither she or Haymitch was expecting me to attack. It was one of the only times I ever caught her unaware."

"But I thought you loved Mother," Karin insisted. "Love's a feeling. How could the Capitol take that away from you?"

Peeta sighed. "To answer that, I'd have to explain the hijacking process."

"Yes!" Jesse exclaimed, pumping his fist. "Err," he reddened. "Not that I'm glad you were tortured, Father. It just sounds like an interesting story."

Peeta chuckled. "It _is_ an interesting story. But I don't want my descriptions of the process to scare you. If it helps, remember that our capitol today doesn't torture anyone, even if they are the most hardened criminal."

You see, after Commander Paylor became President, a republic was established and the old rules of the capitol, including the Hunger Games and the torture were history. The accused were innocent until proven guilty, which was a switch. Cruel and unusual punishment was abolished. So was the death penalty. Memorials were built for all those who lost their lives in the rebellion. My life was paradise compared to what it was like before. Thank God, or else I never would've agreed to having children unless it was safe for them to grow and thrive.

"We're not scared," Karin proclaimed.

"Yeah," Jesse stubbornly agreed.

Peeta turned to me. "Katniss, any objections?"

I shook my head. "I want them to know anything they want to about that time in our history. They're old enough now."

"Fair enough." He started his story again. "So the Capitol had already been torturing me, almost as soon as I was captured from the area from the Quarter Quell. I was almost used to it – they weren't getting anything useful out of me. That was when Snow decided to change tactics. He knew that as long as I had my memories intact that my love for Katniss would never die. So he decided to turn me into a weapon that would destroy the rebellion's mockingjay."

Karin squeezed my hand as Peeta continued to speak. "The night after I warned District 13 of the impending attack, I was taken to the usual torture center, strapped down to the table, etc. But I was injected with something other than truth serum – I felt liquid fire coursing through my veins. The questioner came in, but instead of pumping me for information about the rebels, he asked me all sorts of questions about you, our childhood, our time in school, our romance, and our supposed wedding.

Then he told me that Katniss had cheated on me with Gale, and showed me a video to prove it. That night, I didn't believe it. I knew the Capitol could fake videos using special effects by sticking faces on other people's bodies. But over the next few weeks, using the tracker jacker serum, they convinced me that Katniss forgot about our love in a hurry and was now flaunting her new relationship with Gale."

"But I thought the Capitol told everyone that her friend Gale was Mother's cousin," said Karin.

"They did," Peeta said wryly. "But I was too far gone to remember that. See, when you've been injected with tracker jacker venom on a regular basis, it builds up in your system and you lose all sense of logic. All you can do is feel, and I felt betrayed, so very betrayed by your mother. That was when they started introducing the videos that she gave the rebel order to bomb District Twelve, to kill all my friends and family."

"And you believed that she did it," Jesse said sadly. "You didn't realize that she would never kill her own people."

"Like I said, I was beyond reason," said Peeta. His cheek twitched, like it did when he was under pressure. "I was lost all of my good feelings for her, and the capitol had implanted the suggestion to kill her and it made sense to me. So I tried to carry out their orders the first chance I had." 

I cleared my throat. "I don't mean to interrupt, but I just want to make it clear that I don't blame him for any of it." I could tell that telling the story was taking a bit of a toll on him. I leaned over Karin and kissed my husband's cheek.

"We know you don't blame him," Jesse said impatiently. "Keep going, Father! How did you come out of it?"

"How did you fall in love with Mother again?" Karin asked.

"That took a lot of time and hard work," he said honestly. "No one had ever been rehabilitated from a hijacking before, so they didn't know if it would work, much less how to try and help me."

"I wanted to help him so badly, but every time I got close he would start having a fit," I said. "It was really hard, but I had to stay away from him while he was getting help."

"What sort of fit?" Jesse asked.

"Shouting nonsense about Katniss wanting to kill us all, throwing things, generally being a danger to myself and others," said Peeta. "The doctors didn't know what to do. They had to be extremely careful, because the Capitol had certain "trigger words" or memories that had to do with Katniss or the Hunger Games. If someone accidentally mentioned one, I would have another fit. But if they didn't talk about Katniss, that only meant that they were avoiding the problem."

I jumped in. "We owe everything to Delly Cartwright, well she's Delly Donovan now. She was friends with Peeta when he was little and she was the only person who made it out of Twelve besides me that was his friend. Delly was able to do what I could not, because the Capitol hadn't trained him to be afraid of her. She helped him work through what was real and what was not real. She explained time and again what happened to his home, that the Capitol had bombed the bakery and that was why he would never see his family again. When he insisted that I had done it and not to trust me, Delly defended me, saying that I was a good person and that I'd never give the order to bomb our hometown."

"Delly really set me straight," Peeta admitted. "I knew that a person as good and kind-hearted as her wouldn't be lying to me. It was then that I realized that I'd been tricked by the Capitol. She reminded me of how much I'd risked and sacrificed because I'd loved Katniss. I knew I had to work really hard with my doctors to get better so that I could learn to love your mother again."

"And he did," I smiled. "He worked hard. When he would get confused, we would play a game called 'Real or Not Real'. He'd ask a question about an event that happened and I'd tell him if it was real or if it was just a false memory that the Capitol had planted."

"As the days went on, I had fits less and less," said Peeta. "Slowly, I was able to spend more time with your mother. I improved enough to train to be part of the final mission to take down the Capitol and President Snow, although a few of the higher ups only wanted me to come along because they thought I might do them a favor, snap, and kill your mother."

Karin and Jesse nodded. They didn't really understand it, but they knew all about the complicated politics that went on in the days of the rebellion.

"While we're on the subject of this part of our history, there is something I want to set straight with you two," I said.

"Ah," said Peeta, nodding. "I thought that might come up tonight."

There was no need for him to ask me what I was going to say. He knew.

When President Paylor became our leader, everything got a fresh new start. That meant that the history books were rewritten, and this time they weren't filled with Capitol drivel. Every horrible cold hard detail about the hard fought rebellion was recorded as it happened because we never wanted the generations to come to make the same mistakes that we did. Every detail was recorded, every detail except for one. It went down into the history books that the reason why I had shot President Coin instead of President Snow (who I was supposed to be executing for his crimes) was that I had a case of temporary insanity. A byproduct of the Games, the Quell, the war, the loss of my District, and my sister. It was totally understandable, and very, very convenient.

"I want both of you to know that whatever it says in your history book is wrong," I said calmly. "I wasn't crazy when I shot President Coin. I was every bit as sane that day as I am now. Did they have a good reason for entering it into the history books like that? Absolutely. And I was happy to take the fall. How could we have come so close to letting someone just as bad, if not worse than Snow take power? But I want my children to know the truth."

"Did Coin have something to do with Aunt Prim's death?" Jesse asked.

I recall mentioning in a prior conversation that a very bad woman caused his Aunt Prim to die and that I would tell him more about it when he was old enough to know. He had a good memory.

"Yes. She gave the order to send in Prim's Medical Corps, who were just doing their jobs trying to save the Capitol children. Then she had them fire bombed. I watched Prim get incinerated and I almost died in the bombs that day, myself. It's funny; it was President Snow who actually told me what Coin did. He had nothing else to bargain with, thought he'd try to live a little longer, but he knew he was ultimately a dead man. I think he wanted me to take her out, to keep her from getting the power she so desperately craved."

"I for one am very thankful that your mother did take care of President Coin," said Peeta. "I never liked her much. "She never seemed to care about people. We knew she was selfish, but I never thought she'd stoop so low and kill her own troops, just so that she could jump in and take over the Capitol sooner. We would have captured the area in a few weeks, maximum. What a waste." He shook his head. I knew he was thinking of Prim, and how inconsolable I had been for months after her death. After all, trying to save Prim was what had gotten me into this whole mess. To lose her after everything that had happened had been unbearable. Peeta had been my rock during that time, my steadying constant. His presence eventually pulled me out of my depression. The next year we were married and the rest is history.

"I'm just glad that Coin's idea of making the children of the people who had positions of power in the Capitol compete in a final hunger games as punishment for their crimes died with her." I smiled grimly. "President Paylor rejected it immediately and those like it. She'd seen enough violence and so had I."

"I wish Aunt Prim could have lived to see Panem today," Karin said earnestly. "I think she would've really liked it."

"I wish that too, Karin." I kiss the top of my daughter's head. "She would have loved the freedom, and she would have loved you both. But now it's time for you and your brother to go to bed – it's past your bedtime."

Usually, they whine and carry on about not wanting to go to sleep, but tonight it wasn't so bad. Maybe because we'd let them in on something so grown up. As I watched them scamper off towards their rooms, I felt like I'd had something heavy lifted from my chest. I didn't realize I'd still been carrying that burden. I'd buried it so deep I hadn't realized it was still there.

Lost in thought, I mechanically went through my nighttime routine. It had been quite an eventful evening.

"Are you alright?" Peeta asked as he climbed into bed next to me. He curled around me and wrapped his strong arms around my middle.

"Shouldn't I be asking you that? Of the two of us, you had the more emotional night."

"Yes, but you had to talk about Prim."

All bets are off when I have to talk about Prim's murder.

"I think I'm okay," I realized. "I really wanted them to know the truth. I didn't know I've been carrying that around for so long. It feels good to have finally told them."

"I'm glad." He kissed my forehead. "I feel the same. Now that I know, they don't think I'm a horrible person for trying to strangle you. In fact, Jesse seemed pretty entertained by the whole thing."

"It's a boy thing. I know he was horrified that it happened to his father."

"I know. It seems so long ago, doesn't it?" Peeta sounded wistful. "Almost like a dream."

"Except I'll never be able to forget it," I shuddered. "We'll always have constant reminders. Your leg. Prim. Your family. Twelve."

"But look what we've gained. Love. A family. Freedom."

"It's been worth it, all the sacrifice. This life for our children, one we certainly never dreamed of."

"I love you, Katniss," Peeta said quietly. "Thank you for giving me this. For giving me a second chance after the Capitol hijacked me."

I kissed him in response because, really, what do you say to that?

The End

A/N: I'm planning on writing a multi-chaptered fic that I will post this weekend right after the Hunger Games movie opens. I'm so EXCITED to see it, and I'll bet you guys are too! My story is going to take place where the movie leaves off, borrow some bits from Catching Fire, but it will be an AU where Katniss has to agree to marry Peeta and do a reality TV show of their lives or else Snow will torture the people she loves. Meanwhile, the seeds for rebellion are formulating and Haymitch is making sure Katniss is being kept informed until the time is right to move against the Capitol. I hope you all will keep a look out for it!


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